New Group Promotes Attention For Lee’s Retreat Monterey Pass Battle
By Deborah Fitts

MONTEREY, Pa. — A clash of arms in the mountains during Lee’s retreat from Gettysburg is the focus of a new group that is seeking to draw attention to the little-known battles associated with Monterey Pass.

The action, extending in stormy weather from sundown on July 4, 1863, to the wee hours of July 5, was “very, very unique,” said John Miller, who heads the nonprofit Monterey Pass Battlefield Association.

“It was the only battle fought in four counties and two states (Pennsylvania and Maryland), and on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line.”

Miller’s band of volunteers is hoping to promote tourism to the “Four Corners” area of South Mountain and raise awareness of the fighting.

Hard on the heels of the battle of Gettysburg, around 9 p.m. on July 4, near Fountain Dale, Pa., Union cavalry in pursuit of a retreating Confederate wagon train ran into the Confederate 1st Maryland Cavalry.

Hours of confused fighting, highlighted by artillery fire, included an unsuccessful Union attempt to force nearby Fairfield Pass. Eventually the Federals swept through Monterey Pass, capturing or destroying nine miles of wagons and taking 1,360 prisoners and many horses and mules.

The delay achieved by the relatively small Confederate force was striking, Miller asserted.

“Nowhere in Civil War history do you ever find a handful of guys holding off three brigades of Federal cavalry,” he said. The storm and the darkness presented challenges of their own. “They couldn’t see what they were shooting at.”

This fall the battlefield association is planning a seminar to raise money for interpretive markers. Miller wrote a booklet on the battle that is expected out this summer, again with proceeds to go back into the organization’s efforts.

The group’s Web site describes tour options, and there are plans afoot for living-history events. And Miller said they are creating a database of photographs dubbed “the Fighting Faces” connected with the battle.

Miller cited another point of interest in the area, the summer home that Walter Taylor, Lee’s adjutant, purchased in 1890 in the community of Cascade, then a summer resort.

Taylor’s daughter rebuilt the house after it burned, and it is now a B&B, the Cascade Inn. Miller said that Taylor would recall how he joined Lee in a meal during a pause in the retreat near Monterey Pass.

John Miller serves also as Civil War historian for the Emmitsburg Historical Society. He works seasonally interpreting the Civil War at South Mountain State Battlefield in Boonsboro, Md.